View the grainy film clips again and again. You can clearly see Jackie Kennedy crawling toward the rear trunk of the limo on her hands and knees, snatching up a hunk of her husband’s shattered skull. That handsome face, blown hollow now by the bullet’s hissing trajectory, erasing his smile and the easy adulation he wore like a rumpled suit, erasing the day, erasing the weeks and years both before and after the rifle shots, a Kodachrome spectacle hurling America and a fair chunk of the rest of the world into tailspin. Viewed on TV, Dealy Plaza seemed nearly monumental, but walk it now, and you’ll see how foreshortened and claustrophobic it really is. Imagine how slow a limo needed to move in order make those turns, and then imagine those two women thoroughly coated in their husbands’ blood.

If you believe that John Kennedy’s assassination was simply the result of a few shots fired by a half-crazed lunatic, then you probably place a fair amount of faith in the Easter Bunny. Flip through the literature surrounding the event, and confront the chorus of quasi-governmental ghosts who spring from every dank corner. Go to YouTube and view once again the high drama of watching Jack Ruby shoot Lee Oswald live, on national television–the pistol’s bark, Oswald’s grunting reflex, the stunned cops, the mass confusion flowing like the blood that had oozed a few days before from John Kennedy’s head. And now, explain it all to me so I’ll finally understand the meaning of that event.

Who were these obscure creeps who haunted our own government? Who was David Morales, “El Indio”, a CIA spook stationed in Miami and said to have claimed that he was in Dallas when John Kennedy was shot, and in Los Angeles when his brother Robert was gunned down, said to have told a group of CIA men once in Vietnam that “we took care of that sonofabitch”, and whose death and rank were downplayed, even as dozens of limos bearing CIA men lined the road of an obscure southern Arizona town where he mysteriously died, claiming to a friend that the high-security perimeter he’d installed around his house was there because he was afraid of his own people? Who was David Ferry? Who where those Cuban creeps infesting south Florida’s fetid waterways? Who in the hell were these people?

What about the congressional reopening of the assassination in the 1970’s that culminated with the congressional committee stating that Kennedy’s death was “probably linked to the Mafia”, and what about those gangsters like Sam Giancana and John Roselli found conveniently murdered before they were able to testify?

I brought out-of-town friends to the LBJ Library once, and I sat them down in front of an audio-visual display, and suddenly, there’s Dr. King, the bank burning at Isla Vista, Kent State, and the audio track shifts to Peter, Paul and Mary singing “Blowing In The Wind”, and as always I turned and headed for the door, tears welling and short of breath. We were there, and we’re all ghosts now.